


like a river

by erebones



Series: run me like a river [1]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: First Kiss, Friends to Lovers, Love Confessions, M/M, POV Chirrut Îmwe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-18
Updated: 2017-02-18
Packaged: 2018-09-25 06:44:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9807896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/erebones/pseuds/erebones
Summary: Monsoon season on NiJedha brings Chirrut out of his shell.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first time writing these boys so I'm a little nervous haha. Still getting used to their characters. If you see anything that seems familiar, it's probably because I've been drowning in spiritassassin fic for the last few days and I can't remember where one ends and mine begins. There's definitely a greymichaela easter egg in there, and some callbacks to annie d's "a single monk in good standing must be in want of a bro," which you should read right now immediately if you haven't. Come back and read this after, I'll wait.

_shut your mouth, baby, stand and deliver_

_holy hands, oh, they make me a sinner_

_like a river, like a river_

_shut your mouth and run me like a river_

///

The rainy season on NiJedha is brief but violent. Natives grow up learning to feel the change in the air, the heavy drum of clouds before they appear on the horizon. Elders will rub their swollen joints and mutter warnings, and children will wake in the middle of the night, tasting the uncommon damp on their tongues like the remnants of already-forgotten nightmares.

In the Temple of the Whills, the kyber sings differently. It’s been two full cycles since the last monsoon, and Chirrut feels the ache of longing for it in his teeth. It’s a dangerous time, of course—people who are foolish enough to be caught out-of-doors and unprepared are often swept away by the floodwaters that overflow their gutters and turn their streets into rivers. But Chirrut craves the rain in a way he can’t explain to his sighted peers. The sheer novelty of it, the all-encompassing, inescapable sensation of the heavens opening up, is a pure elation he can feel in his very bones.

As a child, it would get him in trouble. When the storms were at their peak he would sneak out of the initiate dormitories and climb to the highest point of the Temple, leaning out of the window to let the wind and rain lash at his face. He would laugh, and even that piercing sound would be drowned by the roar of the storm. And in all the noise and sensation, he finally found _quiet_.

He brushes his fingers against the dry stone walls as he walks, feeling for the hum. Not everyone can sense it, but Chirrut has always been able to. Like a vibration, or a song, a thing he feels rather than hears. It was what drew him to the temple in the first place, when he was a young boy adrift in the city without family or home. Now, deep in the bowels of the kyber tunnels, he can hear it sing a lower, deep tune, swollen with anticipation. He clicks his nails against the stone and smiles.

“Rain is coming,” he says when he lets himself into the small room he shares with Baze. Having been lifted to junior guardians at the last Trial, they finally have the privacy of a chamber to themselves and all the dubious comforts that affords. He leans his bo staff against the wall beside his cot and goes to the window, pressing open the shutters. The wind that kisses his cheeks is cold and dry, but he knows what he felt. The kyber always knows. “Baze, did you hear me?”

A soft grunt from the direction of Baze’s corner. “I heard.” His voice is slow and sonorous—he was meditating. _Oops_. “I have heard no such tales from the masters.”

“I am not _telling tales_ ,” Chirrut insists. He can hear the scrape of cloth as Baze rises from his reed mat, and he no longer feels guilty for interrupting him. “It’s there, in the kyber. I can feel it.”

“And how can a stone know about rain?” Baze scoffs, but he can’t fool Chirrut. There’s a curl of something in his voice, amusement, laughter that he can’t quite hide.

“The core of the world must understand its surface, or there can be no balance. Baze!” he yelps suddenly, caught off-guard by the gentle tug on his ear. “Quit!”

“Listen to you, Master Îmwe. Going on about _balance_. Rain isn’t the Force. Rain is rain.”

“Just you wait, Malbus,” Chirrut growls. He pushes away from the window but leaves the shutters open defiantly, and he feels under his cot for his own mat. There’s a little time before the bell rings for dinner, he might as well be productive. “You’ll see. You’ll feel it too, in another day or so. Rain is coming.”

Baze lets the argument drop as Chirrut shakes out his mat and sits crosslegged upon it. But he’s too excited to meditate. He mumbles through half a cycle before letting the thread of prayer drop like a missed stitch, and then the room is silent. Chirrut doesn’t bother to close his eyes in prayer or meditation, since it doesn’t really make a difference, but he closes them now, straining his ears from the slightest sound from his friend. He can hear him breathing, slow and steady from his time of contemplation. He can hear the rustle and sigh of clothes being folded and put away. Then the taut stretch and slip as Baze puts his focus into mending the sandal strap that broke yesterday in the dojo. Not Chirrut’s fault.

“I can hear you thinking, Cricket,” Baze says suddenly, voice still rich with amusement. “Meditation is supposed to clear the mind, not fill it with more fluff.”

Baze hasn’t called him _cricket_ in a very long time, he realizes suddenly. Not since they were very young. Chirrut wrinkles his nose. “I’m not a child, Baze. Just because you don’t believe me about the rain—”

“That’s not—I didn’t mean it that way,” Baze stammers over him. “I’m sorry, it just slipped out.”

Chirrut doesn’t know what to make of that, and it troubles him. Baze has been his dearest friend since they were young initiates together, and he doesn’t like it when he can’t understand him. “It’s fine,” he lies. “I’m not upset, I just thought…”

He doesn’t know what he thought. The most likely scenario is that Baze is only teasing him in good fun, as brothers do, but that label doesn’t sit well with him. Not anymore. In recent months, with their new room assignments and their increasingly challenging zama-shiwo training, Chirrut has felt a shift between them, a movement he can’t attribute solely to the Force. He knows that it’s not forbidden for Guardians to find companionship or even love with one another, but even thinking about _that_ , with Baze, sets him on edge. He has no desire to ruin the lifelong friendship they have forged, but neither is he sure how to resolve his feelings.

The best he can do, he decides, is silence. _Say nothing, and perhaps it will pass._ But the tension hovering in the room as he sits, pretending to meditate, is not particularly reassuring.

Baze stirs suddenly, snapping Chirrut’s attention to him. “Will you show me?”

“Show you?” Chirrut echoes, wrong-footed.

“The kyber. I know I’m not as sensitive to it as you, but…”

Joy peaks so abruptly in his chest that he nearly falls over, and just like that, his fears dissolve, unfounded. He scrambles upright and reaches for Baze, fumbling in his eagerness, but Baze is there, reaching out his hands for Chirrut without being asked. “Come. I’ll show you what I mean.”

///

The bell for dinner rang long ago, but for Chirrut, time has stopped entirely. He sits crosslegged on the rough stone floor with his back to the wall of the cave, one of the many little pockets in the stone that honeycomb beneath the Temple of the Whills. His palms rest easily on his knees, open to the low stone roof overhead.

It would almost be a meditative pose if it weren’t for Baze’s hand in his. Baze’s _enormous_ hand. They haven’t touched like this in longer than Chirrut cares to remember—he can’t exactly say why. As children they stuck as close as sand-burrs, racing hand-in-hand through the Temple to their classes, or curling up in the same narrow bed in the dormitory when one of them had a bad dream. Somehow, slowly, that casual intimacy has faded, leaving Chirrut blindsided and a little breathless. The simple pressure of Baze’s hand in his feels like the weight of the whole galaxy.

“I can feel it,” Baze whispers, breaking into his thoughts like a stone parting the waters of a tumultuous river. “I mean—I think I can.”

“You can,” Chirrut says with more confidence than he feels. All his excitement and certainty are now tangled up together, confused by the tightness in his ribs and the way his palms are sweating freely. It’s embarrassing, and yet he can’t bring himself to let go of Baze’s hand. “It’s subtle, but it’s there. Like the way the gong sounds differently depending on who strikes it.”

Chirrut’s skin is prickling all over. He blames the kyber, its closeness, its sweet song promising rain. He blames it, too, for the hypersensitivity that lets him hear the _shush_ of Baze’s eyelids opening, the little ingested gasp of air as he reaches out blindly for the Force.

“Chirrut?” he says. His voice is very small. Chirrut’s hand spasms around his, gripping harder.

“Yes?”

“Have we missed dinner?”

Chirrut swallows an inopportune giggle. He suddenly feels a lot better about his sweaty hands. “Ah… perhaps?”

Baze seems to contemplate this for a few moments. “I don’t particularly want to leave, yet, but we will both be hungry and surly later if we don’t eat now.”

“Always the practical one.” Taking the out with both (metaphorical) hands, Chirrut scrambles to his feet and only avoids cracking his skull on the sloping wall thanks to Baze’s hand on his shoulder. That and the hum of the kyber crystals, suddenly louder and nearer. They sing so sweetly, threatening to dislodge his newfound purpose, but he shakes it off and stands erect, thankful for the few scant inches of difference between them that allows him to hold his head up while Baze must stoop a little to avoid scraping his head on the stone. “I would be quite lost without you, Baze.”

Baze grunts, and there’s a twinge of surprise to the tone of it. “Really.”

“Why so skeptical?” Chirrut demands serenely, hooking their arms forcibly together as if he didn’t know his way through the entire Temple by memory, with or without his staff. “I would’ve been thrown out of the Temple on my ear as a boy if it weren’t for you.”

“You wouldn’t have,” Baze scoffs, though his feet do pick up the pace, sandals shuffling faster as if reminded of their tardiness. “And we’re not boys anymore, anyway.”

“Are we not? What are we, then?”

“Men, very nearly. Why so querulous today, Cricket?” He stops quite suddenly, and Chirrut can feel the directness of his gaze on him, lifting the hairs on the back of his neck. Baze rarely stares at him so intently, making those rare occasions when he does all the more potent. “All these questions and no answers. Have I… offended you?”

“Baze,” Chirrut says gently, as serious as he knows how. He has a bit of a reputation among his peers for being a prankster, perpetually cheerful and always ready with a joke or a smile, but he has never felt less like laughing. “There isn’t anything you could do in an entire lifetime of trying that would offend me.”

“Somehow that’s not an encouragement.” Baze huffs and proceeds, murmuring an absent, “Stairs,” as they come to the winding stone staircase that will lead them to the main floors. Chirrut lifts his foot without missing a beat.

“You see? Lost without you.”

“You knew they were there. You know this Temple better than I do—better than some of the Masters, I’d wager.”

“Blasphemy,” Chirrut gasps. He grunts when Baze pokes him hard in the side. “I promise, Baze, you haven’t offended me. It’s only that I’m… distracted. By...”

They’ve come to the grand archway that leads to the dining hall—Chirrut can feel the empty space rocketing overhead in jarring opposition to the low, rough-hewn ceilings of the kyber tunnels. He shivers in the draft and feels Baze stand closer, shoulder to shoulder. He is warm where Chirrut chills, broad and solid where Chirrut is rangy and lean—a pillar for him to rest upon, like a pilgrim crouched at the base of the Temple’s broad, chipped steps, gathering strength before the final climb.

“Distracted by what?” Baze asks softly.

Chirrut opens his mouth to reply—with what, he’s not sure; certainly not the truth—and instead falls silent as a great roar builds and builds, thundering just beyond the sturdy stone of the Temple’s foundations. He turns his head to catch the sound and grips Baze’s arm, hard.

“The rain.”

///

If there was any chance of getting in trouble for being late to dinner, there is no danger of it now. The entire Temple has been thrown into disarray. Everyone is running hither and yon, initiates scrambling underfoot, and even the Masters have been thrown out of their usual panache as they rush to make room for the sudden torrent of people seeking to escape the flood. Homeless, pilgrims, people caught out in the streets far from their homes—everyone is brought into the Temple’s sturdy walls, and the Guardians are put to the monumental task of accommodating them.

Chirrut is passing out loaves of seed bread over an hour later when Baze finds him: a soft touch on his elbow in the middle of the crowd, different from the grasping fingers of hungry children. He feels it like he feels the morning gong waking him from slumber, his focus going sharp and alert as he turns to face his friend.

“Baze?”

“Master F’lon says when we’re finished to grab something to eat for ourselves and find some quiet time in lieu of evening prayer. D’you want help?”

His basket is still half-full and there are many hungry bellies all around, and yet suddenly all he wants is to escape with Baze and find somewhere quiet to listen to the rain. “Yes please,” he says, shoving the basket toward him. Baze grunts as it hits him in the chest and Chirrut grins. “The faster we pass this out, the faster we can eat.”

The rest of the bread is distributed quickly, and Chirrut follows the heavy tread of Baze’s sandaled feet away from the bubble of sound that is the Temple vestibule. As the tumultuous rise and fall of a hundred voices wanes away, Chirrut’s excitement rises. He’s almost skipping by the time they find the kitchens, and Cook clucks her forked tongue at them as she hands them each a pocket pastry and shoos them out from underfoot.

“Where are we going?” Baze asks as Chirrut takes the lead, his feet leading him unerringly through the twisty back halls of the Temple.

“You’ll see. I won’t, but you will!” he laughs, and yelps when Baze tugs sternly on his sash.

“Chirrut…” He grumbles, but he follows on his heels without protest, his heavier tread echoing Chirrut’s staccato footsteps. It’s a sound that Chirrut will never grow weary of. Baze follows where he leads, always. Perhaps Baze doesn’t know it yet, but Chirrut would do the same for him.

They pass an alcove with a narrow window open to the elements, more of a crack in the stone than anything, and Chirrut comes to a dead halt. Baze walks right into him and grunts with surprise.

“Cricket!”

“What? _You_ watch where you’re going, I’m the blind one,” he chides absently, too distracted to tease him properly. He slots his hand sideways through the narrow opening and catches his breath. “Baze…”

Wetness lashes his hand, a shock to the system. His breath feels trapped in his chest, but not in a bad way—it’s the exhilaration of the fight, of moving through his forms perfectly, of knowing he’s on the verge of besting his opponent. He clenches his fist and trembles.

“Chirrut.” Baze whispers it, but the hand on his shoulder makes him flinch. He softens his touch but doesn’t remove it, and suddenly the knotted stomach he’d had in the kyber mines has returned. His mind revolts even as his body quiets. “This isn’t the place you wanted to show me, is it?”

“No,” he says through numb lips. He drags his hand back through the gap and touches it to his own face, marveling. “Forgive me, my friend. We aren’t quite there yet.”

“Take your time,” Baze says. His voice is thick with suppressed amusement, but Chirrut doesn’t feel mocked. Baze finds joy in Chirrut’s joy, just like he always has. Throat thick, Chirrut grasps for his heavy sleeve.

“Come. Up the stairs.”

There are many dusty corners unexplored in the ancient Temple, but Chirrut knows them all. This one is a particular treasure. It is not the first time he’s brought Baze here, only the first time in a while, and he smiles with satisfaction to hear the brief sound of recognition as he wrenches open an old wooden door—not locked, or bolted shut—and leads the way up a narrow, curving set of stone steps thick with dust to the apex of the spire.

They climb out of a trapdoor into a flat, open room shaped like a garlic bulb. Its pointed roof stands erect against the heavy sky like a staff, or like a Jedi’s sabre, and its sides split open to let the wind whistle through and sing like the kyber far, far below their feet. Chirrut can feel the way Baze trembles beneath his hand, listing slightly with vertigo. He has never seen this view for himself, but the air that wraps around them is thin and cold so far from the negligible warmth of the city’s energy. Chirrut lays on his stomach and crawls across the flat stone floor, its seams worn away by weather, until he finds the nearest opening.

“Don’t fall!” Baze’s voice cracks, and he grabs Chirrut’s ankle in an iron hand.

“I won’t,” Chirrut says, but he wriggles back a little to appease him. “Baze, tell me how it looks. Please.”

The thunderous sound of the rain is a little quieter here than below. With less roof to land upon, it’s only a steady thrum overhead and a prickle of ice whispering on stone like silk against skin. If Chirrut stretches his hands out, he can feel the droplets like flat little stones smacking into his palms and then melting away, harmless.

Baze, after some deliberation, settles in beside him. Shoulder to shoulder, on their bellies overlooking the city and the whole moon, he clears his throat and says, “It’s… grey. I’ve never seen Jedha this color before. Normally it’s yellow, like the flesh of a dura fruit, like the gong sounds or the afternoon tastes when NaJedha is on the rise and everything feels warmer and heavier and sweet. Now… now it’s like winter. Like… cotton robes. Or dust on scrolls that no one has touched in a hundred years.”

“You’ve been here for the rainy season,” Chirrut protests. “You grew up in this city. You know what it looks like.” He can’t help the envy in his voice. Baze is a child of Jedha, but Chirrut was raised far to the south, in the a farming district holed up in cliffs that never saw the rain like this. Out in the open, lancing down. For them, the rain was a curse, an endless river in the gorges that washed away livestock and children and crops. It is only in Jedha that he learned to see the rain for a blessing, and the clean, cool feel of it on his skin is not a _robe_ or a _scroll_. It is not dusty—it is alive and breathing.

“I was a child then,” Baze says mildly, not privy to the whirl of indignation in Chirrut’s head. “I didn’t really understand what it was, except that it was like two sides of a coin: it made the grown-ups happy, because it brought growing and prosperity, and it also made them afraid, because sometimes it was too much and it would wash away things. People.” He falls silent a moment. “Things aren’t very well nailed down in the slums.”

Chirrut fumbles for his hand and holds it. It’s warm like the rest of him, like the line of heat pressed to his side from where they lie side by side. His heart pounds in his chest.

“It’s like,” Baze begins again, “like the sheafs of sweetgrass we burn at Festival. It looks like the smoke smells. And it looks like the grass feels, when you loose the bundles and let the strands sift onto the flames.” His hand is warm and damp in Chirrut’s grip. His thumb moves, rubbing against the back of his knuckles, and when the wind whistles higher through the spire’s open archways Chirrut ducks his head against Baze’s sturdy shoulder.

“It feels like the end of the world,” Chirrut says, nonsensically. “And like the beginning of it.”

Baze hums agreement. Chirrut can’t remember why he ever thought Baze would not understand him.

When Chirrut starts to shiver, Baze coaxes him away from the edge and they sit mashed together in the little stairwell with the trapdoor open, listening. They’re both soaked through, but the stone still holds the heat of summer in its depths, and with their fingers laced together Chirrut grows warm. He tips his head back and exhales a humid puff of air, listening to the way the rain raps against the spire like a million small hands at a door begging entry. And next to him, Baze. His heartbeat. His breath. As familiar to him as his own.

Chirrut is not shy, not by any means. He speaks his mind in his lessons and in the halls, he argues goodnaturedly with his teachers, he draws people to him without really meaning to. He knows this. What he doesn’t understand is why it’s so hard to talk to Baze sometimes. It never was before. They spent the latter part of their childhoods joined at the hip, have always battled for top places in their lessons. When they were young, sometimes they shared a cot when one or the other suffered nightmares. It was easy, easy as breathing. The thought of doing that now, hovering on the edge of their sixth duan and their eighteenth standard year, is nerve wracking.

“Cricket,” Chirrut says suddenly. “Why did you call me that, earlier?”

Baze twitches, and in the small space it feels like a nudge. “I don’t know. It felt like the right thing.” His voice sounds the way it did in the spire, feeling around the edges of the rain. When Chirrut doesn’t press him, he elaborates. “I feel like… things have been different, lately. Between us. And I suppose I miss how it used to be. Easy. Baze the bantha, slow and stupid, and his little cricket friend.”

“You have never been stupid,” Chirrut scolds immediately.

“Ah, ah. Don’t interrupt.”

He sounds so much like Master Laa that Chirrut has to stifle laughter in his sleeve. “I am sorry, Baze. Please continue.”

“I actually—don’t know what else I wanted to say,” Baze admits, embarrassed. “Am I imagining it? You are… so far away from me, sometimes. I think perhaps I have fallen behind.”

“It’s not that. No, Baze, you know very well you will be moving to sixth soon. You have always been more patient in our studies than I.” He chews on the side of his thumb and drops it again. _Bad habit_. “I’m sorry, my friend. I didn’t mean to worry you.”

“I’m not worried. I only feel that perhaps… you are moving on.” There’s an upward tilt to his voice, like he’s asking a question without really asking. “We have always been friends, but sometimes friendships grow and change, and that is nothing to be ashamed of, but I would like to be told. Please,” he adds belatedly. “If you wish to spend less time and energy on me and more with someone else, let me know so that I can accommodate you.”

Chirrut reaches for him instinctively—his arm is like iron under Chirrut’s touch in spite of the gentleness of his words. He is holding back a tide of emotion, a great storm, and it is tight within him like a waterskin ready to burst. Chirrut’s chest aches.

“No, Baze. That isn’t what I—I would never wish to be parted from you. Ever.” He feels the tension in him ease, but only the slightest bit; when he feels down the length of his arm to his hand, his fingers are still curled into fists. Chirrut squeezes his wrist. “If I have been distant, it’s because I… I am afraid.”

Baze snorts. “You are not afraid of anything.”

“Don’t interrupt,” he echoes, but it’s a weak joke and neither of them laughs. Overhead, the rain lashes their lonely spire, and Chirrut reaches into himself for courage. “I’m afraid because I am starting to feel more for you than friendship, and I’m not sure yet what to do about it.”

If it weren’t for the rain, the stairwell would be utterly quiet. Baze doesn’t even breathe, and Chirrut fancies that for a moment or two, his heartbeat stops as well. When he exhales again at last, Baze grabs Chirrut’s hand where it rests on his forearm and tangles their fingers together.

“Not sure what to do? You couldn’t just tell me?”

“I didn’t know how to say it,” Chirrut whispers. He feels sick to his stomach, but the way Baze grips him like his life depends on it keeps him grounded. “I didn’t want to push you away.”

“Push me away! Haven’t I always followed where you led? Haven’t I pledged myself to you in all but words?”

Chirrut bites back an instinctive reply, considering his words. To pass into the fifth duan, an acolyte must meditate alone for twenty-four hours. Chirrut took twenty-eight, and when he surfaced, simultaneously humming with energy and shaking with exhaustion, Baze had been the first one waiting for him outside the chapel, the one to catch him before he fell, the one to bring him back to their dormitory and see that he got rest and food before the elevation ceremony. It’s not the only example that springs to mind, but it’s the first, and Chirrut feels like a fool to not have recognized what Baze was trying to tell him.

“Words would have helped,” he says weakly.

“You know I’m no good at words. _You_ are the master of elocution, not me.”

“Apparently not, as I have been silent on this subject until now.” He tightens his grip a little, feeling the texture of Baze’s sleeve under his hand. He feels Baze leaning in and he leans back, until their foreheads are pressed together and Baze’s breath puffs warm against his cheek. “May I have words, Baze? Just a few?”

Baze smiles on an exhale. “You are like the rainy season, Chirrut. A force of nature. Beautiful and terrible… ow!”

Chirrut elbows him in the side, but he’s laughing. “Stop!”

“What? You asked for words, what more do you want?”

“I love you,” Chirrut says. The laughter in his throat dies and subsumes to his chest where it lingers, dissolving into something quieter. “I hope that is… acceptable to you.”

“ _Acceptable_.” It’s not quite a scoff, but it’s close. “You have always had my love, Cricket. To have yours is not acceptable, it is a necessity.” He adjusts them, wrapping an arm around Chirrut’s damp shoulders, and the narrow stairwell suddenly seems more spacious. Chirrut snuggles closer nonetheless, tangling his fingers in Baze’s robes.

“When we are raised to seventh—”

“When we are old and grey, you mean?”

“Hush! When we are raised to seventh, and become full Guardians, will you pledge yourself to me?”

Baze touches his lips to Chirrut’s forehead. They are dry and warm, and ringed by a little bit of stubble that has grown since his last shave, and Chirrut shivers. “Yes.” No hesitation. “I would be honored to serve at your side, Cricket.”

Chirrut touches his face, the softness of his cheek, his lashes. When he squints his eyes shut, a roadmap of wrinkles spread from the corners of his eyes and mouth, and Chirrut absolutely must kiss him. He puts the pad of his thumb on Baze’s lower lip to guide him, and Baze lets him. When their mouths touch, he is smiling.

There’s a sudden scream of wind and ancient hinges, and the trapdoor overhead slams shut. Chirrut is now in Baze’s lap, heart racing with terror, and after a frozen moment in which they realize what has happened, they start to laugh.

“How rude,” Chirrut says of the trapdoor, and Baze cups his chin and kisses him again.

It’s very nice to be kissed while on someone’s lap, Chirrut decides. It makes everything more cozy. His arms are around Baze’s neck and one hand is in his hair, growing tangled and curly on the top in between trimmings, and Baze’s enormous hands are solid on his waist. He is in love, he thinks. Desperately, wantonly, over his head. But it’s okay, because Baze is gasping a little every time they part, and his hands are shaking at his waist, and when Chirrut presses his tongue between his lips the noise he makes sounds like the split of joy careening in Chirrut’s breast. He is suddenly and profoundly glad for his lack of sight, because he thinks that all these things together—the sound of him, the feel of him warm and sturdy, the _taste_ of him—would be impossible to take in if he could also _see_ him.

The kiss ends naturally, with a satisfied sigh whose source Chirrut cannot quite pinpoint. Yet he still feels hungry for it, blood moving warmly and quick through his veins in an unfamiliar way, and when he presses closer to Baze’s warmth, he knows that he is not alone in this.

“Chirrut,” Baze sighs. A loving, rumbling sigh that Chirrut can feel in his bones. And in other places. “Whills guide me, but you make me an impatient man.”

Chirrut hums, appreciative. He had been afraid to let himself consider this, before, consider the shape of Baze under his clothes. Now he is definitely considering it. And perhaps now is not the best time or place, but the promise of future intimacy is a kind of satisfaction all its own.

Overhead, the wind whistles in the cracks of the trapdoor, and he reaches up to find the latch and bolt it shut securely. “Kiss me again,” he whispers. “Please.”

Baze does so, but only briefly. Their lips cling and part, and when Chirrut huffs, Baze kisses his cheek, swift and smiling. “The hour is late. We should return to our rooms, Cricket.”

Chirrut opens his mouth to protest, but then a whole new host of possibilities make themselves known in his mind and he leaps up, one hand grabbing for Baze’s hand. “What a good idea, Baze. You are so brilliant and clever. What would I do without your ingenious mind guiding me to new heights of tranquility and understanding!”

Baze only grunts in reply to his antics, but Chirrut can tell that he’s smiling.

**Author's Note:**

> The inspiration for this song was bishop briggs' "River." And there will definitely be a companion piece that's a little more nsfw. heh.
> 
> Many thanks to earlgreyer for the beta! Feel free to follow me on tumblr @erebones :)


End file.
